Macintosh II si

[bibilit]

A week or so, somebody advertised an SE to give away, i replied i was interested in collecting the Mac.

I was quite disappointed to discover that the SE was indeed an SI, or rather a pair of them.

Both of them are dusty and very yellow (rather brown as the previous owner is a smoker) but the good news is that one of them has 16 Mo of ram and a rasterOps video card.

Also came a full set of documentation.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Don't be too disappointed, the IIsi is a VERY underrated Mac. With just an inexpensive Radius Color Pivot II/IIsi/PDS Riser and an EtherNet Card it'll stomp any Accelerated SE and give unaccelerated SE/30s a run for the money.

[Cory5412]

The IIsis are rather nice little machines.

Ethernet or whatever can easily be added to them, along with up to 65mb of ram, and they can run A/UX pretty easily. Additionally, two hard disks will fit inside, if you use the right ones.

I rather miss mine, which had 33mb of memory, ethernet, two hard disks and was running A/UX 3.whatever.

[beachycove]

Nice tip on two drives in a IIsi. I have never tried that.

One of the good things about the IIsi is that it will run System 6 — and like greased lightning.

[bibilit]

Played a little with the the pair yesterday, both turned on once connected with the proper devices.

One on them won't boot to the Os (the original Conner HD is not working) but the other (the one with the RasterOps video card) booted to 7.1 without any problem.

I spent half an hour fixing the floppy drives as both were stuck, and have a look at the impressive collection of discs the owner gave to me.

Unfortunately, the system itself is missing but i have most of the original documentation and some original interesting programs (Adobe Illustrator, Conneticx Ram Doubler, Hypercard) and tons of sharewares.

[Bunsen]

Ethernet or whatever can easily be added to them

Unfortunately, as they use the same PDS, you're competing to some extent with SE/30 fans for cards. That can drive the prices up.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I love the expansion bay under the FDD, I've yet to explore uses for that cubic.

I'm replacing the full height 3.5" HDD temporarily installed in my IIsi (it's a pull from one of the Q700 Triplets) with a half height drive to make room for the RAM SIMMs hanging down from the Radius Rocket. With the Rocket on board as an accelerator, I don't need more than the 15MB that I already have on had for it and the 5MB in there now will likely do.

I've also rescued a mint IIsi case that was listed on eBay as a great case for a PC Hacker. So I'm looking into possibilities for the lesser of the two cases after I finish up the SuperIIsi Hack. If that project goes to plan, you'll have more expansion options for yours.